Meaning of the Cross
You know that old hymn When I survey the Wondrous Cross? Its a standard. It almost represents the Church itself. It’s comfortable and peaceful, like a sit by the fire in an old pair of slippers. Like going home and getting a hug from your mother. The words are true, that before peace, when you think about the Cross and know what its all about, you get hammered by a Truth, resulting in an essential disconnect from the world and its cares, setting them only on what really matters.
The Cross or the Nace
But I take that back. Not when you survey the Cross. The real Cross—when rightly surveyed—is not merely a symbol, nor even a device of execution, but the singular phenomenon in history through which the least deserving Person imaginable suffered. What is truly wondrous about the Cross is not its horror, nor its shape, but that it stands as the one sign—the Nace—capable of severing our gaze from the horizontal pull of this world and fixing it upon our true home, where wonder is not metaphor but origin. The Nace is the Cross reoriented—not in form, but in meaning—toward the non-contingent, miraculous, prophetic pattern revealed by God and never once conceived by man, nor preserved by Church culture.
The Cross. That instrument of Roman torture, that altar of immolation, that scandalous beam. One vertical and one horizontal piece—speaking, as it came to do, of both heavenward devotion and worldly division. But if we seek to raise a banner for the true Messiah and the faith He fulfilled, we must first strip away the cultural overlay. Remove the horizontal. What remains is not a denial of history, but a recovery of truth. The Greek New Testament never calls it a “cross” in the traditional sense. It calls it stauros—a stake, a pole. We should ask, then, what has the shape stood for all these centuries? And what should it stand for?
This is not new. It is common knowledge among lexicographers and scholars. And that is precisely the indictment. Nothing obscures this truth—except our preference for what is partial, familiar, or less offensive to cultural taste.
Superficial Survey
The word translated “cross” in the New Testament is stauros. According to Liddell and Scott:
“Wood cut and ready for use, firewood, timber… beam, post, cudgel… stake on which criminals were impaled… of live wood, tree.”1
In Acts 5:30 and 10:39, the apostles state that Jesus was hanged on a tree—in Greek, xulon. Strong’s Concordance defines it as:
“Timber… a stick, club or tree or other wooden article or substance.”2
Elsewhere it denotes spears or staves, as in Matthew 26:47.
The Romans employed four main types of crosses:
Crux simplex — a single vertical post.
Crux decussata — an X-shape, or “St. Andrew’s cross.”
Crux commissa — a T-shape, without an upper beam.
Crux immissa — the traditional Latin †.
Apologists for the Immissa often cite the sign above Jesus’ head as evidence. Yet they omit the crux simplex as a viable alternative. Medical objections to the viability of vertical suspension remain unsubstantiated and unconvincing.
Denominational Survey
The Latin cross does not appear in early Church iconography until after Constantine, when Christianity became the state religion. Pagan imagery and practice were adopted en masse to accommodate polytheists. Cross symbols existed in multiple pagan traditions long before Constantine.
Protestants denounce these influences but make exception for the cross itself, though its shape is never once described in Scripture. It has become untouchable—sanctified not by revelation, but by cultural entrenchment.
Jehovah’s Witnesses claim the stauros was a single post. And while they are wrong on nearly everything else, even they can stumble across a truth. But neither they nor the traditional church ask the deeper question: not which shape is historically correct, but which meaning is prophetically revealed.
Interrogative Survey
What makes one cross right and another wrong? Not geometry. Not tradition. Not even history. What matters is whether the form carries the substance of faith as revealed—whether it is a sign from God or a symbol of man.
Catholics rely on tradition as equal in authority to Scripture. Jehovah’s Witnesses deny both. But what of Protestants, who claim sola scriptura? If the cross is their symbol, on what basis is it chosen?
Some argue the shape is irrelevant—it’s the meaning that matters. Yes. But meaning is not subjective if the sign is prophetic. The absence of a clear biblical symbol is itself a revelation. We do not need symbols. We need signs.
The real issue is not aesthetics but epistemology. Not whether the Latin cross is pagan, but whether the stake—the Nace—is prophetic.
Prophetic Survey
“Cross” in Scripture carries a double valence: the physical object, and the redemptive act. This reflects the dual layers of biblical meaning—p’shat (surface) and remez (hint).
The Midrash Ruth Rabbah sees in Ruth’s meal with Boaz a remez of Messiah:
“‘Come this way’, refers to King Messiah… ‘dip your morsel in the sour wine’, refers to the sufferings of the Messiah, as it is written, ‘he was wounded for our transgressions…’”3
Likewise:
“It will be with the last deliverer (the Messiah), as with the first (Moses)… he will reveal himself to the Israelites and then withdraw for a while.”4
The stake—stauros, xulon—is not just a Roman execution device. It is a prophetic sign, not chosen by culture but appointed by God. A nace, a banner. Not a shape to adorn jewelry or altars, but a signal to all nations (Isaiah 11:10). The Messiah was lifted up not to inspire reverence for a symbol, but to fulfill what was spoken of Him.
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